You cannot have more than 150 Facebook Friend

How many friend you have on your ‘FacebookOrOrkut’ profile or even combination of both

Say, 1000,2000…

If your are popular in your community then …10000,50000…..

You can have any number of friends in your friend list but can handle up to a

Maximum of 150 pals only.

Surprised…Flooded by thousand of questions in your mind…This is not possible…

You have lots of friends, may be much more than that …You can handle more than that..

You are handling much more

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

You are no different. I had the similar reaction when I read the claim made from

a new study by researchers at Oxford University

Browse through the list of friends you have in your social networking site and truth will be in the front of your eyes. You hardly even know the names of all the pals in your mammoth list of buddies.

According to the research while social networking site allow people to keep up more relations but the number of meaning friends are more or less the same as we had through out the history.

This theory is known as “Dunbar Number”, theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.

Dunbar’s number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex (the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language) size, and this in turn limits group size .

The limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained. On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again

According of Primatologist, because of social nature of primates (prime , first rank, group that include monkeys, apes …), they maintain relations with other member of the group but the volume is limited by the neocortex part of the brain. This study suggests that their exists a species-specific index of the social group.

Dunbar used the similar correlation on the human beings to find the specific index of humans. He conducted surveys of social grouping of variety of societies and found that the 150 is the mean group size of the community that have high incentive to stay together.

The researchers are now studying the social networking websites to see if the Facebook effect has stretched the size of social groupings. Preliminary results suggest it has not.

“The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people who we observe in the real world. People obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends but the reality is that they’re unlikely to be bigger than anyone else’s. There is a big sex difference though, girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together,” Mr. Dunbar said.